The Lieu Crew: Hanging out in South Bend with Aunt Kerri and Uncle Eric

We spent the week before Thanksgiving in South Bend at Kerri and Eric's house. It was fun to see their house all decorated, get a glimpse into their normal lives, and just get to spend time with them.

Compared to our house- Kerri and Eric's seemed like a zoo to Samantha. We all know who is going to teach her about animals. Here Samantha meets Junior, the bearded dragon.

After her encounter with Junior we had a little bath :)

Bath time is getting a little harder!

On Tuesday we visited Kerri and Eric at Notre Dame. Eric works in the same building where Kerri has her lab. Kerri's office wasn't all that interesting- you know typical grad student desk in the basement, but Eric's space was a bit more interesting. Here we are with the little fishies and froggies- those are the technical terms of the lab animals of which Eric takes care (Kerri and Eric are rolling their eyes at me right now).

To continue the Martin family animal trend- Rocky- Kerri and Eric's part-time dog came and visited on Tuesday night. He was great with Samantha.

Also we are obsessed with blowing raspberries these days when we should be smiling for pictures.

Oh and waving- Samantha does lots of waving these days.

While I was putting S to sleep, Andrew tried his hand at baking- delicious snicker doodles! How did I get a husband that was so talented in the kitchen!

And we enjoyed the snicker doodles while playing a game of Dixit- and Henry came to join us for it.

It was very snowy on Wednesday so we spent some time snuggling inside- what a tickly and smiley little nugget!

You can't see them all in this picture, but she now has six teeth that are almost all the way in!

We tried Samantha outside for a few moments- it's really the first time she had ever experienced snow, and she definitely didn't know what to make of it.

P.S. This is the snow suit I wore 29 winters ago.

Still snowing- South Bend got just under a food of snow while we were there.

She loves her Daddy! (and seriously loves riding on shoulders these days)

And Wednesday afternoon some special visitors showed up- Nana, Granddad, and Lanie- who had driven twelve hours all the way from New York to be with us for Thanksgiving!

We celebrated Andrew and Eric's birthdays that night- both of them have birthdays in the ten days before Christmas!

Samantha also got a few presents from Nana and Granddad to prepare her for Christmas.

Unsurprisingly she was more interested in the wrapping paper than the presents.

We had a lot of fun on Thursday- but I'll tackle Thanksgiving in my next post. On Friday we spent the morning touring Notre Dame's campus. Someone was happy to have some company in the back seat.